Revival

I am in essence, a writer. This can mean many things to many different people. However, I am sure that most of them will agree that you find inspiration wherever you can find it; whether it is at the bottom of a wine glass or shocking your system with the most shocking parts of human depravity, or even just looking at life, in its harsh reality. Personally I prefer the wine glass, but others may not.

As a writer, you take on many personalities. You see other people and imagine their lives. It is a type of voyeurism, albeit an imaginary one. You see things and make inferences based on very little fact. What is it like to be a woman, a lover, a soldier, a ruler, a villain?

A writer can’t afford the luxury of a single world view, can’t afford to take on the aspect of a single gender, group or culture. You have to see things as other people see them. You have to live the lives they live, feel what they feel and see things as they see them. It can be hard at times, living the lives of other people; feeling what they feel and believing as they do.

Imagine a book, where everyone has the same beliefs, same values, and same reactions. The cleverer of you might be able to name the few books that are exactly like that, and the more enlightened among you will readily admit that those books are somewhat tedious and boring (I am being diplomatic here)

With so many people in the world, each with their own personal view, personal set of beliefs and their own set of life experiences, it becomes difficult for a writer to judge one as right and one as wrong. If you cannot identify with your villain, your hero will be weak.

I digress. This post is not about good and evil, hero and villain, but rather about the lives of other people, and therefore, your own.

Once you have lived the lives of the many around you, it becomes difficult to remember your own. You realise the wants, needs and motivations of others, but seem to forget your own at times. Generally speaking, this is not a problem. Being able to see and visualize your characters as individuals, with their own beliefs, emotions and value systems is an asset that any writer will attempt to gain. It makes your characters people. It makes people identify with them but you lose sight of the fact that not everyone can do this.

At heart you are many people, believing many things, allowing those around you to be just as they are because you understand them (or at the very least believe you do). Those around you cannot always understand this. Why would you defend someone who has done them wrong? Why would you even try to understand the reasoning of someone that offended them? How could you see anything positive in a reasoning that most would consider flawed?

Meanwhile you wonder how they cannot see it. How can they not see the flaws in their own reasoning?

This does not mean that writers have a kind of omnipotence with regards to human behavior – they have their own prejudices to overcome – but I would like to believe they are on the path already.

Understanding those who are close to you is often more difficult and hazardous than understanding the human race in general. A friend or a lover could be a lot more subjective about you and your behavior than you are about theirs. You might not realise how much (or how little) you and your opinions mean to them.

Personally, I have tried to open the minds of those around me, though I do not know how successful I have been. I have noticed that where I thought I had succeeded, I have, in fact, failed. In other cases I had thought I have failed, but succeeded.

I guess the moral of the story is to be true to yourself, even when you think it will be received poorly. Sometimes it will be, but other times it will be an impression that lasts a lifetime.

Some Kind Of Happy

It's almost been a year since my last post. Lots of things happened in-between, some good, some bad and most insignificant. Most of the people I know, me included, are not quite where they wished they would be. There seems to be a lot of unhappiness going around. So I decided to make that my topic.

I believe a lot of people have a misconception of what happiness is. Happiness is always portrayed as something hidden, a treasure to be found. Something that, when found, would stay with you until the day you die. So they spend half their lives, or more, trying to find eternal happiness. I have discarded this notion.

I see happiness as transient, a brief period of joy that passes with the moment or with the setting of the sun. Like frost on a cold winter morning, it will eventually fade.

How then can people claim to be happy? A happy life depends on the amount of happy moments present in one’s life. A lot of people claim that happiness is found in oneself. In a sense this is true. No-one can identify a happy moment for you, or surround you with people that elicit joy. You have to do that yourself.

I believe that many people are so busy searching for ‘eternal’ happiness that these moments pass them by. Sometimes small, seemingly important things can make you unhappy in a moment that should have been filled with joy. From experience, I know that it is not always easy to prevent these things from making you unhappy, but then, I view unhappiness as transient too.

Human beings like to cling to things that make them unhappy. I would compare it to an addiction. Unhappiness gets attention, it gives convenient excuses. I tend to be very fond of melodramatic, melancholy events in my life. Most of the time it allows me to write poetry, and writing poetry makes me happy. So to give up on unhappiness, I would most likely have to give up on my poetry as well. Not an idea I relish.

But I have learned to enjoy life a lot more than I used to, simply by enjoying the moments. The exchange of n secret smile, the wind on my face, a meaningful conversation, friends, a guy on a bicycle with a live chicken under his arm. These are the things that make life interesting and as long as life is interesting, I am happy...kind of :)

I appologise for the short, incomplete post. There is lots more to say on this topic, and perhaps I will adress it in a future post. For now this is what my tired, uninspired mind came up with.

A moment in time

A recurring theme that seemed to pop up frequently during the last two months was the idea of moments in time. A friend suggested it as a topic and even though it is not an easy topic to explore, my inquisitive nature would not allow me to let it lie.

Our lives are made up of a series of moments, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes these moments present choices that will affect our lives in profound ways. In one moment, a relationship can start or end. Friendships can me made or ruined. In some of the rarer moments you can change your life (or that of someone else) for the better. Unfortunately lives can also take a turn for the worse in these moments.

It is only natural that we want the bad moments to pass swiftly and the good ones to last forever. We would like to avoid moments with difficult choices or, if impossible to avoid, attempt to make the choice with the least amount of risk. It also often happens that we are involved in moments where we are but witnesses or catalysts. It could be a pivotal moment for someone else and you are powerless to influence the outcome.

The question was asked: How do we make the (good) moment last?

Is it possible to make a moment last longer? I believe it is. There are ways to make a moment last longer in time, to make a moment last an hour instead of 5 minutes. It has to do with conversation options, how well you know the other people involved and how well you know yourself. But the idea I would like to explore is something different.

I do not see time as linear. The reason for this is that time, and how quickly or slowly it passes, is often dependent on perception. Sometimes an hour can feel like 10 minutes or 10minutes can feel like an hour. I believe there are ways to control how we perceive time. It is not easy because it requires us to me more aware of ourselves and our thought processes. It is something we can learn though…

To borrow a term from new-age and spirituality beliefs, I will explore the idea of ‘living in the moment’. I find it sad that good ideas and philosophies can loose a lot of value because of its source. I dislike the airy-fairy, not scientific, non-empirical assumptions that new-age belief systems make, but then, my own belief system is not based on a lot more.

Now, back to the topic of ‘living in the moment’. I think most of us don’t live in every second of a minute. Unfortunately we are creatures that get distracted easily. There are countless things that interfere with our thoughts and perceptions in the space of a second. It could be stress at work, effects of a previous moment in our lives, plans for the rest of the day, shopping lists or anything else that has nothing to do with the moment we are in. Sometimes the moment itself can present distractions, introducing thoughts that send you off on tangents. Sometimes these tangents can be meaningful, can enhance the moment, but they can also subtract from the moment.

The ‘good moments’ that we remember are most likely moments where we managed to put all these distractions aside. With no interference, we are able to enjoy the moment to its full potential. You can immerse yourself in the moment, use all your senses to explore the moment and find all there is to find.

How then, with all these variables, can we live in the moment?

To live in the moment takes hard work and practice. You need to be aware of the distractions and make a conscious effort not to indulge in them. Some distractions are put aside more easily than others. The easy ones are the place to start. Being aware of them and denying them access to the moment will make it easier to ignore the bigger ones. In the beginning this process could be a distraction in itself but it becomes second nature after a while. Focusing on the moment at hand becomes easier. Every second of the moment will become meaningful.

Do I claim I can do this? By no means but I am getting better at it. ;)

Choices, choices, choices

Have you ever played an RPG with multiple endings? The ending depends on choices you make during the game. I usually like to save the game before those choices and play out all the different endings. I believe that I am attracted to RPG’s because of how it imitates real life. During our lifetime we are forced to make an almost infinite amount of choices ranging from mundane to life changing. Each choice we make has some sort of effect. Sometimes these effects are so small that we do not even notice them.

I can not help but wonder what lies at the other end (or ends) of the choices we make. According to some theories in string-theory there are an infinite amount of parallel worlds. Some of you might have seen the movie called ‘Sliding Doors’. What if each of these parallel worlds, represent a different choice with a different outcome. Would they all converge on the same ending like in the movie? Can an infinite amount of choices lead to a finite amount of endings or does it lead to an infinite number of endings? How much effect can my choices have on the rest of the world? Does the ‘butterfly effect’ really apply?

These are questions that, as yet, have no answers but it is clear that our choices have a great effect on our own lives. In an ideal world, we would have all the information necessary to make an informed choice, to choose the outcome that we would prefer. On one hand, it irks me that I cannot always predict what the outcome of my choices will be, or which choice is the best.

We use the resources we have at the time, gather information, compare and weigh, list pros and cons, just to decide whether we should get the vanilla or the choc-mint ice cream. It is always easy to say you should have chosen differently after a choice was made, but even then, you can not be a 100% sure the outcome would have been preferable.

Every choice we make has a price but we rarely know what that price is. What do you sacrifice by choosing one thing over another? What things do you miss out on by going one way rather than another? Can one choice determine that you will never be happy or will there always be a chance to return to happiness? People suffering from decidophobia are so afraid of making (wrong) choices that they depend on others to make their choices for them.

You can spend a lifetime second-guessing your own choices. That is why I decided not to regret any choice I make. In this world, this one continuous moment of consciousness, I will make my choices and stick with them, even if the outcomes are less than desirable. Perhaps there is a me in one of those parallel worlds that made all the right choices and is living the best life imaginable. That thought is enough…for now.

What do you see through those eyes of yours?

I must admit, I do not think this is very impressive for an opening post but it is what I have and what I give to you.

Your perception of your world, your worldview or frame of reference, colours every aspect of your life. It determines how you react to other people and how you behave in certain situations. None of the above should be earth shattering news. Extensive psychological studies have been done on this topic. I will not list them nor will I claim I have I read them. Psychological analysis is not my intention, although the psychological content is high

How do I perceive the world around me and how does that affect my life as a whole? To answer this question it was necessary to make an attempt to analyze my own behaviour and those of others as objectively as possible but as you will realize objectivity is not only impossible but counter-productive to this exercise. If you do not know the colours of your own filters, it is impossible to identify the filters of others.

As a bit of background information, this is not an idea that I came up with last month or even last year. It is a concept I have juggled with, consciously and subconsciously since my early teens.

The thought process started with the following question: How do other people perceive me? I want to make it clear though, this was not in order to seek validation or acceptance through others. Quite frankly I couldn’t care less what they think of me but I am however still interested in the answer to the question. Call it academic interest if you like.

The reason for this question stems from the fact that I believe I know myself very well. I believe there is nothing about myself that I hide from myself. Unfortunately I cannot prove this to myself. Only through interaction with others can it be proved or disproved, but even that is not what bothers me. My question is this: Can they see the things that I know about myself? Am I living my life so true to myself that their perception of me comes close to my perception of myself?

I believe this question applies to every one of us although I also believe few people can be bothered to find the answer. In attempt to discover the answer I tried to take on other people’s perspective, tried to determine in what colours they see me. Needless to say I have only had limited success. In order for there to be any success at all you have to know the other person very well. There aren’t that many people who I am that close with.

That is not to say I did not learn anything. Identifying differences in worldviews can be quite enlightening in terms of the inner workings of your own and other people’s minds. Reactions can be predicted to a certain extent. Even failure to predict a certain reaction can be insightful.

So now that I sound like an asocial pseudo-scientific experimenter I feel it is important to say that gaining insight into the thought processes of others is something that came to me in my teens. It has become a second nature to the extent that I am not even aware that I am doing it. It is only in hindsight that I review situations and draw conclusions. How would I have acted in reverse rolls? Why would I have acted that way? What are my underlying motivations? Are they valid? In this I learn more of my own worldview and the worldview of others intrigue me even more.

Are some worldviews better than others? I think some worldviews make it easier to live life while others make it more difficult. Something to remember is that another person’s reality is not something you have any influence over. You can not make someone else see things differently if their reality does not allow things to be different. The only reality you can have control over is your own. It is not easy to change your reality but control over your reality can increase with time.

I believe my own worldview has become an amorphous concept that changes and adapts as necessary. How do I see the world? It differs from day to day. The parts that seem good and the parts that help, tend to be more solid. I try to keep the negative parts of my worldview fluid. It is difficult to change any part of your worldview that has already solidified. Once you believe it is true, it becomes true for you. It is a trap that I would not like to fall into, again.

I would really like to go into some of the worldviews that I have come across but I am not a full fledged psychologist (nor will I probably ever be) and describing them will take more thought on my part. Perhaps another time ;)